semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in cuzco quechua

5.2. THE CONJECTURAL ENCLITIC -CHÁ 183
follows that it is the speaker—and not just the logical apparatus—who is deriving
the conclusion from the premises. And this is the evidential meaning component of
-chá we want to account for. 6
The problem with this argument is that it would predict that any element that
is analyzed as making reference to a modal base is an evidential with the value
reasoning. In particular, modals like may would be evidentials in the same way as
-chá (cf. section 3.2). Unless this is a desired result, the consequence of the account
just sketched would be that possible world semantics cannot be used to account for
non-evidential modals, including adverbs like perhaps. I am at this point not in a
position to adopt this consequence as a valid one, and will therefore also not adopt
this account of the evidential meaning of -chá wholeheartedly.
In summary, an epistemic modal analysis of -chá is certainly viable, and if -chá were
the only enclitic of its kind in Quechua, this analysis might be preferable over the illocutionary
analysis developed in the next section. However, the fact that -chá always
has wide scope with respect to propositional operators, that it can only occur in illocutionary
force bearing environments (see section 6.3), and that it is in a set with two
other evidential enclitics, for which the illocutionary analysis clearly is more adequate,
leads me to adopt the illocutionary analysis for -chá as well.
6 Recent accounts of epistemic modals within the AI literature make this evidential requirement
explicit in the semantic representation. For example, Stone (1994) analyzes epistemic must as coming
with an explicit index to an “argument” (in the rhetoric sense, not in the functor-argument sense),
where “an argument consists of some minimal collection of applications of defeasible rules which can
consistently be added to K to obtain some conclusion”, where K is a set of established propositions
consisting of so-called ground formulas, logical rules, and defeasible rules (Stone 1994:6). A sentence
of the form must S(A) (where S is the embedded proposition, and A a particular argument) is
true in a given context, which consists of the set K, if and only if the argument entails (the logical
form of) S in that context. Again, in and of itself this account does not make reference to the
speaker, and the logical apparatus derives a valid conclusion all by itself. However, when felicitously
asserting a sentence containing must, a speaker intends to refer to this argument in the same way as
a speaker intends to refer to the referent of any referring expression. One could imagine an analysis
of -chá also along these lines: it could be analyzed as a possibility modal, with an additional index
pointing to the argument that the speaker claims to support the conclusion that ¦p, wherep is the
embedded proposition. Since it is not clear to me what the status of this index is (if it is part of
the proposition expressed, then, according to the challengeability test, it should be affected by a
challenge), and since I do not want to complicate things even further, I will not discuss this approach
in more detail.